But I think it would be a great idea to provide a process by which ordinary citizens could get certified to carry on airplanes.
Great, then we could get the same rate of accidental deaths by firearm on aircraft that you get in your cities.
Nonsense.
First of all, just what do you think the accidental firearms death rate is? I'll bet it's far, far lower than you think. Feel free to look it up, or, if you prefer, take a guess and I'll tell you.
Second, the rate of accidental, intentional and all other forms of non-justified firearms homicide by citizens who've bothered to get a concealed carry permit (a much, much easier process than what I described) is basically zero. In fact, it's significantly lower than the same rate for police officers.
You're being led astray by a bunch of false assumptions. Check out the facts.
You do realize that the price of crude oil (and therefore gasoline) is determined by the spot market, and therefore the oil companies have (almost) nothing to do with the price of gasoline you pay at the pump?
Come on, man, don't you know that high prices are rock solid evidence of anti-competitive collusion? You must be a one-percenter.
and more useful (for web-based stuff) than the tablet
Disclaimer: I work for Google
You should have gotten something better than your Android tablet;)
Meh. I've used iPads plenty; they're not significantly better than my Galaxy Tab in any way. And not nearly as good as my Chromebook, for the tasks for which the Chromebook is well-suited.
Or just give everyone a gun before they get on the plane, like the Airplane movie. If everyone has one, any hijacking attempts will be foiled, no?
I actually, seriously, support this idea. Oh, not just "hand a gun to everyone"; I'm an NRA rifle and pistol instructor and the concept of handing loaded weapons to people with no training makes me shudder. But I think it would be a great idea to provide a process by which ordinary citizens could get certified to carry on airplanes.
Require extensive training and very thorough background checks, and even require the applicants to pay for all of it out of their own pockets, and there would still be tens of thousands of people who would apply and get certified. It would be an almost zero-cost way to effectively massively multiply the number of "air marshals" flying on US aircraft. If not enough people volunteer (not likely, IMO), just have the FAA make a rule requiring that at least two passengers on every flight be armed or it doesn't fly and then airlines will have an incentive to offer benefits to volunteers, or to employ their own people. Then we could go back to pre-9/11 security.
For a miniscule fraction of the TSA's budget we could make sure that hijackings are a thing of the past. Terrorists could still blow up airplanes, but there's really not much value in that. It's much more effective to blow up a crowded shopping mall, or a sports stadium, or poison a city's water supply, or...
The reason terrorists have traditionally focused on airplanes was because they provided transportation as well as terror and publicity. The 9/11 attackers' innovation was to use them as guided missiles. Remove both of those possibilities and they become relatively uninteresting targets.
We need to do this like the Israelis do; they catch this kind of stuff in the parking lot before the culprits even get IN the terminal.
You really don't want that. Have you ever been through Israeli airport security? It's extremely invasive, time-consuming and manpower-intensive. When flying out of an Israeli airport, always arrive at least four hours before the flight -- you're going to need it.
What we actually need to do is suck it up, accept that real security is too costly and damaging, that 9/11 was a pin-prick that killed fewer people than die on the roads every month and did less property damage than a big hurricane, and in any case can't happen again because the passengers won't stand for it, and just accept the risk that something bad may happen on one out of a million or so flights. Then we can go back to pre-9/11 security.
As far as Israel is concerned, I also doubt he would stand in the way of selling munitions to our allies. It's the actual going to war and fighting ourselves that he's down on as I read his statements.
Paul would cease foreign aid payments to Israel, including in the form of subsidies for munitions. But Israel doesn't really need our free money, they can afford to buy the stuff.
Bah. The only time I used unemployment benefits I discovered they were worthless; wouldn't cover even half of my mortgage, much less feed my family. I was better off flipping burgers part-time. I learned then to pay attention, see the writing on the wall and jump ship before getting laid off, rather than waiting until after.
In any case, if the unemployment benefits office tried to cut me off because I refused to give personal, non-business information to a potential employer, I'd appeal that decision, and I'd win.
How is that any better than opening your laptop's lid? It takes a couple of seconds for Mac OS X to wake up and connect to wi-fi.
My Chromebook is usable faster than my MacBook Pro.
It can also do a lot more thanks to the way more powerful CPU
Which doesn't really matter if all I'm going to do is use web apps. All the CPU horsepower I need is on the servers.
you can use Firefox instead of Google's proprietary browser
I prefer Chrome over Firefox anyway. It's faster and cleaner.
all those ChromeOS laptops are way overpriced
This I agree with. The price for mine was $0, so that wasn't an issue. Even with the bundled two years of 3G service, I still don't think I'd have paid $400, not with the extreme bandwidth limitation on the service (100 MB per month).
I'm blessed with a glut of computing hardware, I suppose, but I have a desktop, a laptop, a chromebook, a tablet and a smartphone. Oh, and I have a bluetooth keyboard which can be used with the tablet or the phone. With all of those options, I would have predicted that I'd never use the chromebook. It seems like if I need a full keyboard I'd use the laptop or desktop, while if I just need to do something small, I'd use the tablet, or the phone.
In fact, I find the Chromebook fills a couple of important niches in my life. First, it's what I reach for when I want to look something up on the web, fast. It's more portable than the desktop, quicker to get running than the laptop and more useful (for web-based stuff) than the tablet or the phone. Second, it's my "shareable" computer. I'm not handing my laptop to anyone. I wouldn't even if it weren't a company laptop and therefore forbidden to be shared with non-employees. My tablet and my phone are even less shareable.
But the Chromebook? I log out, hand the little machine over and say "just log in with your Google account". And for people who use lots of web apps, all their apps are "there". If they use Chrome on other computers and use Chrome Sync, when they log in all of their bookmarks, etc., are all on the Chromebook already.
The combination of instant access, super battery life, built-in 3G data and shareability makes my Chromebook one of the most-used computers in my house.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but have no particular interest in selling Chromebooks. I just quite like mine -- though I probably wouldn't have one if Google hadn't given it to me.)
Something to notice about your two lists: Look at which items on the lists a president can actually do and which ones he can't.
Your "all for it" list:
Drug legalization. The president can't do this by himself, it requires Congress to change the law. He can tell the FBI and the DoJ to go easy, though. Congress could appoint special prosecutors to do the work the the president directed the DoJ not to do.
Bringing home the troops. The president is Commander in Chief. If he orders the military to come home, they come home.
Restoring civil liberties. Some portions require new law, which only Congress can do, but in large part the president can simply direct federal agencies to stop stomping on civil liberties. He's their boss. The PATRIOT act may still be there, but if the president decides not to use it, it's moot (at least until the next president, which is why the laws do need to be changed).
Cutting back on big military spending. Again, the president is Commander in Chief. Congress passes the budget, but nothing says the DoD has to actually spend it all.
Your "seriously concerned" list:
Returning to a gold standard. The president can't do anything here, only Congress.
Eliminating social welfare programs. The president can't rescind the programs without Congress. He may be able to order the agencies to stop distributing the money. I think it more likely that he would order the agencies to come up with more stringent guidelines.
Deregulation of business. Similar to social programs, only Congress can change the core regulations. The president could probably get the SEC to revise its guidelines, and could probably get te DoJ not to prosecute -- but Congress could still appoint prosecutors.
States' rights. Neither the president nor Congress can allow the states to violate fundamental rights. That would require a constitutional amendment, to repeal the 14th. Again, the president could direct the DoJ not to prosecute, and again Congress could appoint prosecutors.
Also, in the areas where a president went too far in exercising his executive powers, Congress could pull him up short by passing legislation that limits his freedom of action in those areas. They probably couldn't limit his power as Commander-in-Chief, because that's not an authority they gave him, but all of the social programs, business regulation, etc., are powers created by legislation, not the Constitution. The authority given by Congress can be taken away, or limited, by Congress. They'd have to do it with veto-proof majorities, but if the president tried to do anything too extreme, that could be done.
Bottom line: Most of the things you'd like RP to do would be within his power as president, while the things you wouldn't like would not. To achieve any of those things, he'd have to convince Congress.
I've said it before and apparently I'll say it again. This is how the interview would go:
HR Person: "Please provide your login credentials for Facebook."
Interviewee: "I don't use Facebook."
HR Person: "Right. 'Refused to provide Facebook login credentials.'"
Result: Circular file.
Not for me. Here's how it would go:
HR Person: "Please provide your login credentials for Facebook."
Me: Have a nice day (as I stand to leave)
HR Person: Where are you going?
Me: To interview with better companies.
You do understand that we are talking about little children and not kids in middle or high school right? These primary school age kids were supposed to use the applications pre-loaded and the teachers, assistants and/or school IT people would be the ones who might use the source listing/hacking features.
I understand very well what the target audience was; I contributed for a while, writing math ed activities (stuff targeted to 3rd & 4th grade students). The target audience was not just "little kids", it was basically K-8. I don't know about you, but I was experimenting with programming in 5th grade, and probably would have started younger if I had access to a machine. There is plenty of opportunity within the target age range for the programming experience -- and for the younger kids, making the computer more like a "regular" Linux computer, like the GP seemed to think was a problem, would be a bad idea.
From what another in these threads said from experience in parts of Peru, it's an educational mess. Kids are told what to do and what to write down and not to think on their own. And it's so corrupt that teachers are told to clock-in by signing in with their name and time started along with ending times but what they do is always write when they were supposed to start and supposed to end. It's all about appeasing the political powers that be and not so much about teaching independent thought.
How sad.
I would think that with a little bit of overview on the device and it's apps, many kids could have a ball learning on their own at home with the XO and if a neighbor was close enough, networked learning and playing too. The XO does mesh networking so 2+ devices allows for many of the Sugar apps to be worked on together( shared ).
LoB
It is not the computer that matters, it is the software. The problem with computers in school is the software that we use -- software that is designed to be impossible to hack and which encourages students to pull out pencils and paper to solve their problems.
If that's the only problem, then the OLPC should have been a huge success, since it was designed from the ground up to be a hackable, tweakable system, with a "Show Source" button on the keyboard that allowed you to display and modify the source of whatever you were using and a Python interpreter as one of the main "activities".
I'll admit that I thought the hackability of the OLPC would make it successful, at least at educating kids on computing. It appears I was wrong.
For me, at least, not having an ordinary filesystem available was a showstopper.
But one of the core ideas behind OLPC is incompatible with having an ordinary file system available -- and not an idea meant to limit the utility to education, but one intended to hugely improve the ease and safety with which random code could be exchanged between machines. The Bitfrost security model is really interesting and has huge possibilities for making "promiscuous computing" safe, but it requires making the whole user-visible system run within the model. One of the key components is that all code runs within its own extremely restricted view of the file system. Accessing any file requires going through the system to get the user's permission to access a particular file, which is then mapped into the restricted view.
Providing easy access to the full file system completely breaks this -- which is fine for power users who are wiling and able to take full responsibility for their system security, but exactly what you don't want for kids who you'd like to allow the ability to explore and tweak in arbitrary ways. Under the OLPC model, there was always the option to get a developer key and get deeper access to the system, but the limitations imposed on non-developers were intended to give them the opportunity to safely explore until they could learn enough to safely go to the next level.
This is all related to one of the goals of OLPC that seems to have gotten lost along the way: Putting easy-to-program computers in the hands of millions (or hundreds of millions) of kids. The idea was to give them computers that actually allowed them to modify and adjust the system behavior in an environment where it was nearly impossible for them to break anything. The "first world" model of computing has gone the opposite direction, turning our computers into limited-function devices which allow users to do only whatever is listed in the menu, and OLPC wanted to give the rest of the world an opportunity to find and create a better way.
I suppose that this idea boils down to one of programmer-centric computing "activism", trying to create a chance for millions of bright youngsters to be exposed to and become accustomed to the idea that computers are machines which can be made to do what the user wants. I guess the idea failed. Apparently people want computing appliances... that certainly seems to be the message of the mobile world, especially the hugely-successful iDevices. But I think it was an idea very much worth trying.
Your question isn't very clear. I'm going to assume that by "communication" you mean "talking to people". If that's the case, the answer really is old technology plus attitude, approach and effort. What tools do your clients use to communicate with each other (besides face to face)? Most likely the answer is telephone, e-mail, and exchange of documents. Maybe they also use some sort of IM client. You should do that -- talk on the phone, exchange e-mails and IMs, and read and write documents, and do all of it about twice as much as you feel you should have to, because not being there in person hurts your ability to communicate normally with them.
If you do want to add some cooler technology to make that work better, there are some options. You can replace (or augment) phone calls with video conferences. I work for Google, so we obviously do pretty much all remote conferencing via Google+ Hangouts, and it works really well. It's also extremely easy for people to install and run on their own machines, provides a shared whiteboard, screen sharing and shared document viewing/editing and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux (and Android, and ChromeOS, and maybe others, dunno). There are good remote collaborative document editing tools, too. Google Docs works very well, and I'm sure there are other options as well.
But if what you're asking about is communicating with people, the tech won't do nearly as much for you as just making a committed effort to overcommunicate. When your clients begin telling you that you really don't need to communicate with them quite so much, then you know you've got it about right. If it seems like putting this much effort into communication will make you less effective at actually getting stuff done, well, you're right. It's part of the cost of telecommuting.
You're modded funny, but I don't think it's a joke because a lot of people seem to think like that. The flaw, of course, is that 90% of federal spending goes to the military or social programs, which really don't do much for those issues.
In Obama's 2012 budget (the one that popped up first on Google), social programs are 63.5% of federal spending and the military is 19.3%, so your total is 82%. If you add in the interest payments (which also don't do anything for those issues), it takes you to 89% of the budget. (Not arguing with you, just providing some more detailed support for your estimate).
Moreover, any funding for regulations could be (and often are) paid for with fees instead of taxes.
Minor nitpick - Latitude doesn't tell you where they are going. If you want to prevent their going somewhere, you still want them to tell you where they are going. With latitude, you can only take corrective measures - come back straight home, NOW!
True, they still have to tell me where they're going -- and if they don't, they get in trouble. I'm such a mean dad.
Since you work at Google - do you develop Latitude?
I don't. My relationship with Latitude is just as a user.
Slashdot Mirror
But I think it would be a great idea to provide a process by which ordinary citizens could get certified to carry on airplanes.
Great, then we could get the same rate of accidental deaths by firearm on aircraft that you get in your cities.
Nonsense.
First of all, just what do you think the accidental firearms death rate is? I'll bet it's far, far lower than you think. Feel free to look it up, or, if you prefer, take a guess and I'll tell you.
Second, the rate of accidental, intentional and all other forms of non-justified firearms homicide by citizens who've bothered to get a concealed carry permit (a much, much easier process than what I described) is basically zero. In fact, it's significantly lower than the same rate for police officers.
You're being led astray by a bunch of false assumptions. Check out the facts.
You do realize that the price of crude oil (and therefore gasoline) is determined by the spot market, and therefore the oil companies have (almost) nothing to do with the price of gasoline you pay at the pump?
Come on, man, don't you know that high prices are rock solid evidence of anti-competitive collusion? You must be a one-percenter.
My point was that you didn't have a choice, even if it paid less than unemployment, you HAD to take it.
And my point was that unemployment is worthless, so not a reason to suck up to potential employers who I really don't want to work for.
and more useful (for web-based stuff) than the tablet
Disclaimer: I work for Google
You should have gotten something better than your Android tablet ;)
Meh. I've used iPads plenty; they're not significantly better than my Galaxy Tab in any way. And not nearly as good as my Chromebook, for the tasks for which the Chromebook is well-suited.
I did take the burger-flipping job, and not only did it pay better than unemployment, I felt better about it, too.
Or just give everyone a gun before they get on the plane, like the Airplane movie. If everyone has one, any hijacking attempts will be foiled, no?
I actually, seriously, support this idea. Oh, not just "hand a gun to everyone"; I'm an NRA rifle and pistol instructor and the concept of handing loaded weapons to people with no training makes me shudder. But I think it would be a great idea to provide a process by which ordinary citizens could get certified to carry on airplanes.
Require extensive training and very thorough background checks, and even require the applicants to pay for all of it out of their own pockets, and there would still be tens of thousands of people who would apply and get certified. It would be an almost zero-cost way to effectively massively multiply the number of "air marshals" flying on US aircraft. If not enough people volunteer (not likely, IMO), just have the FAA make a rule requiring that at least two passengers on every flight be armed or it doesn't fly and then airlines will have an incentive to offer benefits to volunteers, or to employ their own people. Then we could go back to pre-9/11 security.
For a miniscule fraction of the TSA's budget we could make sure that hijackings are a thing of the past. Terrorists could still blow up airplanes, but there's really not much value in that. It's much more effective to blow up a crowded shopping mall, or a sports stadium, or poison a city's water supply, or...
The reason terrorists have traditionally focused on airplanes was because they provided transportation as well as terror and publicity. The 9/11 attackers' innovation was to use them as guided missiles. Remove both of those possibilities and they become relatively uninteresting targets.
We need to do this like the Israelis do; they catch this kind of stuff in the parking lot before the culprits even get IN the terminal.
You really don't want that. Have you ever been through Israeli airport security? It's extremely invasive, time-consuming and manpower-intensive. When flying out of an Israeli airport, always arrive at least four hours before the flight -- you're going to need it.
What we actually need to do is suck it up, accept that real security is too costly and damaging, that 9/11 was a pin-prick that killed fewer people than die on the roads every month and did less property damage than a big hurricane, and in any case can't happen again because the passengers won't stand for it, and just accept the risk that something bad may happen on one out of a million or so flights. Then we can go back to pre-9/11 security.
As far as Israel is concerned, I also doubt he would stand in the way of selling munitions to our allies. It's the actual going to war and fighting ourselves that he's down on as I read his statements.
Paul would cease foreign aid payments to Israel, including in the form of subsidies for munitions. But Israel doesn't really need our free money, they can afford to buy the stuff.
You: losing your unemployment benefits.
Bah. The only time I used unemployment benefits I discovered they were worthless; wouldn't cover even half of my mortgage, much less feed my family. I was better off flipping burgers part-time. I learned then to pay attention, see the writing on the wall and jump ship before getting laid off, rather than waiting until after.
In any case, if the unemployment benefits office tried to cut me off because I refused to give personal, non-business information to a potential employer, I'd appeal that decision, and I'd win.
How is that any better than opening your laptop's lid? It takes a couple of seconds for Mac OS X to wake up and connect to wi-fi.
My Chromebook is usable faster than my MacBook Pro.
It can also do a lot more thanks to the way more powerful CPU
Which doesn't really matter if all I'm going to do is use web apps. All the CPU horsepower I need is on the servers.
you can use Firefox instead of Google's proprietary browser
I prefer Chrome over Firefox anyway. It's faster and cleaner.
all those ChromeOS laptops are way overpriced
This I agree with. The price for mine was $0, so that wasn't an issue. Even with the bundled two years of 3G service, I still don't think I'd have paid $400, not with the extreme bandwidth limitation on the service (100 MB per month).
Hell if I walked out every time an interviewer asked me a question I disagree with I probably would never get past an interview stage.
There's a world of difference between "a question I disagree with" and "hand over your password".
In practice, that has yet to be a problem.
I'm blessed with a glut of computing hardware, I suppose, but I have a desktop, a laptop, a chromebook, a tablet and a smartphone. Oh, and I have a bluetooth keyboard which can be used with the tablet or the phone. With all of those options, I would have predicted that I'd never use the chromebook. It seems like if I need a full keyboard I'd use the laptop or desktop, while if I just need to do something small, I'd use the tablet, or the phone.
In fact, I find the Chromebook fills a couple of important niches in my life. First, it's what I reach for when I want to look something up on the web, fast. It's more portable than the desktop, quicker to get running than the laptop and more useful (for web-based stuff) than the tablet or the phone. Second, it's my "shareable" computer. I'm not handing my laptop to anyone. I wouldn't even if it weren't a company laptop and therefore forbidden to be shared with non-employees. My tablet and my phone are even less shareable.
But the Chromebook? I log out, hand the little machine over and say "just log in with your Google account". And for people who use lots of web apps, all their apps are "there". If they use Chrome on other computers and use Chrome Sync, when they log in all of their bookmarks, etc., are all on the Chromebook already.
The combination of instant access, super battery life, built-in 3G data and shareability makes my Chromebook one of the most-used computers in my house.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but have no particular interest in selling Chromebooks. I just quite like mine -- though I probably wouldn't have one if Google hadn't given it to me.)
Something to notice about your two lists: Look at which items on the lists a president can actually do and which ones he can't.
Your "all for it" list:
Your "seriously concerned" list:
Also, in the areas where a president went too far in exercising his executive powers, Congress could pull him up short by passing legislation that limits his freedom of action in those areas. They probably couldn't limit his power as Commander-in-Chief, because that's not an authority they gave him, but all of the social programs, business regulation, etc., are powers created by legislation, not the Constitution. The authority given by Congress can be taken away, or limited, by Congress. They'd have to do it with veto-proof majorities, but if the president tried to do anything too extreme, that could be done.
Bottom line: Most of the things you'd like RP to do would be within his power as president, while the things you wouldn't like would not. To achieve any of those things, he'd have to convince Congress.
I've said it before and apparently I'll say it again. This is how the interview would go:
HR Person: "Please provide your login credentials for Facebook." Interviewee: "I don't use Facebook." HR Person: "Right. 'Refused to provide Facebook login credentials.'"
Result: Circular file.
Not for me. Here's how it would go:
HR Person: "Please provide your login credentials for Facebook."
Me: Have a nice day (as I stand to leave)
HR Person: Where are you going?
Me: To interview with better companies.
You do understand that we are talking about little children and not kids in middle or high school right? These primary school age kids were supposed to use the applications pre-loaded and the teachers, assistants and/or school IT people would be the ones who might use the source listing/hacking features.
I understand very well what the target audience was; I contributed for a while, writing math ed activities (stuff targeted to 3rd & 4th grade students). The target audience was not just "little kids", it was basically K-8. I don't know about you, but I was experimenting with programming in 5th grade, and probably would have started younger if I had access to a machine. There is plenty of opportunity within the target age range for the programming experience -- and for the younger kids, making the computer more like a "regular" Linux computer, like the GP seemed to think was a problem, would be a bad idea.
From what another in these threads said from experience in parts of Peru, it's an educational mess. Kids are told what to do and what to write down and not to think on their own. And it's so corrupt that teachers are told to clock-in by signing in with their name and time started along with ending times but what they do is always write when they were supposed to start and supposed to end. It's all about appeasing the political powers that be and not so much about teaching independent thought.
How sad.
I would think that with a little bit of overview on the device and it's apps, many kids could have a ball learning on their own at home with the XO and if a neighbor was close enough, networked learning and playing too. The XO does mesh networking so 2+ devices allows for many of the Sugar apps to be worked on together( shared ). LoB
Indeed, it certainly seems like that should work.
It is not the computer that matters, it is the software. The problem with computers in school is the software that we use -- software that is designed to be impossible to hack and which encourages students to pull out pencils and paper to solve their problems.
If that's the only problem, then the OLPC should have been a huge success, since it was designed from the ground up to be a hackable, tweakable system, with a "Show Source" button on the keyboard that allowed you to display and modify the source of whatever you were using and a Python interpreter as one of the main "activities".
I'll admit that I thought the hackability of the OLPC would make it successful, at least at educating kids on computing. It appears I was wrong.
For me, at least, not having an ordinary filesystem available was a showstopper.
But one of the core ideas behind OLPC is incompatible with having an ordinary file system available -- and not an idea meant to limit the utility to education, but one intended to hugely improve the ease and safety with which random code could be exchanged between machines. The Bitfrost security model is really interesting and has huge possibilities for making "promiscuous computing" safe, but it requires making the whole user-visible system run within the model. One of the key components is that all code runs within its own extremely restricted view of the file system. Accessing any file requires going through the system to get the user's permission to access a particular file, which is then mapped into the restricted view.
Providing easy access to the full file system completely breaks this -- which is fine for power users who are wiling and able to take full responsibility for their system security, but exactly what you don't want for kids who you'd like to allow the ability to explore and tweak in arbitrary ways. Under the OLPC model, there was always the option to get a developer key and get deeper access to the system, but the limitations imposed on non-developers were intended to give them the opportunity to safely explore until they could learn enough to safely go to the next level.
This is all related to one of the goals of OLPC that seems to have gotten lost along the way: Putting easy-to-program computers in the hands of millions (or hundreds of millions) of kids. The idea was to give them computers that actually allowed them to modify and adjust the system behavior in an environment where it was nearly impossible for them to break anything. The "first world" model of computing has gone the opposite direction, turning our computers into limited-function devices which allow users to do only whatever is listed in the menu, and OLPC wanted to give the rest of the world an opportunity to find and create a better way.
I suppose that this idea boils down to one of programmer-centric computing "activism", trying to create a chance for millions of bright youngsters to be exposed to and become accustomed to the idea that computers are machines which can be made to do what the user wants. I guess the idea failed. Apparently people want computing appliances... that certainly seems to be the message of the mobile world, especially the hugely-successful iDevices. But I think it was an idea very much worth trying.
Your question isn't very clear. I'm going to assume that by "communication" you mean "talking to people". If that's the case, the answer really is old technology plus attitude, approach and effort. What tools do your clients use to communicate with each other (besides face to face)? Most likely the answer is telephone, e-mail, and exchange of documents. Maybe they also use some sort of IM client. You should do that -- talk on the phone, exchange e-mails and IMs, and read and write documents, and do all of it about twice as much as you feel you should have to, because not being there in person hurts your ability to communicate normally with them.
If you do want to add some cooler technology to make that work better, there are some options. You can replace (or augment) phone calls with video conferences. I work for Google, so we obviously do pretty much all remote conferencing via Google+ Hangouts, and it works really well. It's also extremely easy for people to install and run on their own machines, provides a shared whiteboard, screen sharing and shared document viewing/editing and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux (and Android, and ChromeOS, and maybe others, dunno). There are good remote collaborative document editing tools, too. Google Docs works very well, and I'm sure there are other options as well.
But if what you're asking about is communicating with people, the tech won't do nearly as much for you as just making a committed effort to overcommunicate. When your clients begin telling you that you really don't need to communicate with them quite so much, then you know you've got it about right. If it seems like putting this much effort into communication will make you less effective at actually getting stuff done, well, you're right. It's part of the cost of telecommuting.
Her death would definitely make things easier on us, but if she can get through the next few years she will recover so, no, it's not the best option.
You're modded funny, but I don't think it's a joke because a lot of people seem to think like that. The flaw, of course, is that 90% of federal spending goes to the military or social programs, which really don't do much for those issues.
In Obama's 2012 budget (the one that popped up first on Google), social programs are 63.5% of federal spending and the military is 19.3%, so your total is 82%. If you add in the interest payments (which also don't do anything for those issues), it takes you to 89% of the budget. (Not arguing with you, just providing some more detailed support for your estimate).
Moreover, any funding for regulations could be (and often are) paid for with fees instead of taxes.
Indeed.
Tidy up those loose wires!
Unless the cop can show probable cause for the arrest, you should be able to get the evidence thrown out as the result of an illegal search.
Minor nitpick - Latitude doesn't tell you where they are going. If you want to prevent their going somewhere, you still want them to tell you where they are going. With latitude, you can only take corrective measures - come back straight home, NOW!
True, they still have to tell me where they're going -- and if they don't, they get in trouble. I'm such a mean dad.
Since you work at Google - do you develop Latitude?
I don't. My relationship with Latitude is just as a user.
Law enforcement should not have easy access to a persons medical journal and thus should not know that the person is considered a suicide risk.
These police officers had already taken her to the ER for suicide watch twice before. Her history is very well documented.
Even if you are the owner of the phone it is not your privacy that is being invaded so no your opinion should not matter at all.
If nothing else, they should be able to track the phone in order to recover my stolen property.